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When you imagine a young man with a fishing line on a verdant riverbank, you might not immediately connect that image with one of a young man hanging out under a bridge downtown. But Allen Mace was doing both when I spoke to him last month. Perched on the shore of the Mississippi near Mill Ruins Park, the foundations of the Stone Arch Bridge looming overhead, Mace marveled at the beauty of his urban fishing hole, “My view right now is to die for. Something you can’t get many other places, I’d assume,” he said.
Where fish-the-noun go, fish-the-verb enthusiasts are bound to follow. And it doesn’t matter much to them if the spot the fish are biting happens to be in the shadow of skyscrapers or within earshot of a major road. Fisher folk gather on the beach where Minnehaha Creek flows into the river. They rollerblade down Bryant Avenue with a wobbling pole attached to a backpack. They ride a bus home from Lake Phalen with fish flopping inside layers of plastic shopping bags. Once you start looking for it, you’ll find fishing everywhere in the Twin Cities — and you’ll also start to notice the hard work that goes into making sure people can keep casting a line.
While plenty of other cities have places people can fish, the Twin Cities stand out because of the sheer number of available bodies of water. Many people in the metro region are within a few miles of a lake, said Mario Traveline, who works with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ Fishing in the Neighborhood program. Part of his job is making sure that those lakes have fish in them.
It’s not a given that they will. People want to use city lakes in lots of different ways, Traveline said, and sometimes those uses conflict with each other. Take, for example, ice skating. To have a good ice skating lake, you need a safe, solid surface — which often means turning off aerators that would otherwise bubble oxygen through the water and disturb ice formation. Unfortunately, that oxygen is also pretty important to the local fish. The trade-off for a great winter of skating might be losing most of the fish in a lake, or whittling the population down to one particularly hardy species. After several low-oxygen winters, Powderhorn Lake got taken over by bullheads, a type of catfish. “A couple years ago that’s all you could catch,” Traveline said. “We wanted to have some variety.”
The solution: Scoop up a netful of fish from a densely populated lake outside of town and drop them in the city like a setup for some piscine reality show. These literal fish out of (familiar) waters aren’t specifically chosen by species. Instead, the DNR nets whoever comes along for the ride. And that can result in funny situations, like the April 14 restocking of Powderhorn that added 495 bluegill, 600 perch, 62 black crappie, eight northern pike, and exactly one largemouth bass. (Traveline did not name the bass. I asked.)
Most fish delivered to the cities this way will spend the summer being caught and released and, if they’re lucky, overwinter and successfully breed a new generation. But some do get eaten. Rachel Forde lives on the east side of St. Paul and fishes both for fun and to contribute to her regular diet. Forde cooks fish curry. She makes stock. “I use every part of the fish,” she said. “Once you have the equipment, it’s a cheap source of protein.”
